Lectures on Dostoevsky • Lectures on Dostoevsky • Joseph Frank Edited by Marina Brodskaya and Marguerite Frank Prince ton University Press Princet on & Oxford Copyright © 2020 by Prince ton University Press Published by Prince ton University Press 41 William Street, Prince ton, New Jersey 08540 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press . princeton . edu All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Brodskaya, Marina, 1957- author. | Frank, Marguerite, editor. | Frank, Joseph, 1918-2013, author. Title: Lectures on Dostoevsky / Marina Brodskaya, Marguerite Frank, Joseph Frank. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2019. Identifiers: LCCN 2019020469 | ISBN 9780691178967 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821-1881--Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PG3328.Z6 B685 2019 | DDC 891.73/3--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020469 ISBN (e- book): 9780691189567 British Library Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available Editorial: Anne Savarese and Jenny Tan Production Editorial: Ellen Foos Text and Jacket Design: Leslie Flis Production: Erin Suydam Publicity: Jodi Price and Katie Lewis Copyeditor: Aimee Anderson Jacket art: Manuscript page from Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871–1872) This book has been composed in Arno Pro Printed on acid- free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Grateful acknowl edgment is made for permission to reprint “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” from Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace. Copyright © 2005 by David Foster Wallace. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Com pany. Figures 1 through 4 courtesy of the family of Joseph Frank. Contents • Foreword by Robin Feuer Miller vii Preface xix Introductory Lecture 1 Chapter 1: Poor Folk 14 Chapter 2: The Double 28 Chapter 3: The House of the Dead 45 Chapter 4: Notes from Under ground 72 Chapter 5: Crime and Punishment 100 Chapter 6: The Idiot 125 Chapter 7: The Brothers Karamazov 154 Appendix I: Selected Adaptations for Film and TV of the Novels Covered in the Lectures 183 Appendix II: “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” by David Foster Wallace 187 Acknowlegments 211 Index 213 v Foreword • In 2002, when Joseph Frank completed his five- volume literary biography of Dostoevsky, he joined the ranks of such biographers as Leon Edel (Henry James: A Life), Richard Ellmann (James Joyce), Walter Jackson Bate, (John Keats), Janet Browne (Charles Darwin: A Biography), not to mention James Boswell and his Life of Johnson. In any proj ect spanning de cades, one’s view of one’s subject changes, as does the cultural and critical climate sur- rounding the biographer himself. Frank’s opus reflects both his evolving take on Dostoevsky— the writer, the thinker, the man— and his own development as a major critic of our time, one whose early preoccupations with theory gave way to his sub- sequent interest in creating, by the time he reached volume 5 (Dostoevsky: The Mantle of the Prophet, 1871–1881), an almost day- by- day account of the last de cade of Dostoevsky’s life. Readers can even indulge in drawing parallels between the number of pages of Frank’s biography and those of Dosto- evsky’s novels or between the span of de cades of each as well: there is a similarity of scale, a similarity of preoccupation with certain big themes and ideas, as well as movement forward in surprising new directions. Monumental biographies, such as Frank’s Dostoevsky volumes, shape the way we understand not only a writer and his work but the world— both the subject’s world and our own. Frank later worked to condense his hefty opus into a single- volume version that appeared in 2009: Dosto­ evsky: A Writer in His Time represents a fascinating distillation of literary analy sis and cultural history. vii viii Foreword But now, posthumously, a completely new distillation, in yet another genre— the lecture—h as appeared. Lectures on Dosto­ evsky by Joseph Frank, edited by Marina Brodskaya and Margue- rite Frank, renders an exquisite yet provocative series of Frank’s lectures to his students at Stanford, where, astonishingly, only after his retirement from Prince ton did he, arguably the world’s most renowned Dostoevsky scholar, begin regularly to teach a course on Dostoevsky from within a Slavic department. (Years earlier, when visiting Harvard, he had offered a course on Dos- toevsky.) The Lectures are a gift to general readers as well as to scholars of Dostoevsky, who w ill surely find themselves ponder- ing the contrast between Frank’s emphases in his critical writ- ings and t hose in evidence in his lectures to students and a more broadly based reading public. Joseph Frank was born in 1918 on the Lower East Side of Man- hattan, an immigrant neighborhood where many of Amer i ca’s future intellectuals spent their childhoods. His f ather died when he was a young child, and he was adopted by his mother’s sec- ond husband, William Frank. Those who knew Frank will re- member that he suffered from an occasional stammer, which remarkably did not hamper his brilliance as a lecturer. Turning inward as a child, he became a voracious reader and, while still in high school, attended lectures at the New School for Social Re- search. His parents died when he was still a young man, and nearly penniless, he traveled to the University of Wisconsin where he had heard that the dean was sympathetic to Jewish students seek- ing an education. Amazingly, although he had never received a BA, he was accepted and earned a PhD at the University of Chicago from the famous Committee on Social Thought. During the 1940s and beyond Frank began to publish a series of ground- breaking essays and quickly became recognized as one Foreword ix of the country’s most promising literary critics and theorists. His essay “Spatial Form in Modern Lit er a ture,” first published in 1945, remains a classic and formed the core of his seminal book, The Widening Gyre: Crisis and Mastery in Modern Lit er a ture. (This work appeared in a second edition with impor tant additions and commentaries as The Idea of Spatial Form [1991]). Frank wrote essays for the leading intellectual and literary journals in the United States (such as the Sewanee Review, the Hudson Review, the Partisan Review, and the New Republic) on an impressive range of artists and authors— Gide, Flaubert, Mal- raux, Mann, Goya, Cezanne, Sartre, Proust and, increasingly, Dostoevsky. Many readers first encountered Frank’s work on Dostoevsky through his unforgettable essays on Notes from Under ground, The Idiot, and The Possessed. Reading these essays could change the way one read not only Dostoevsky but novels in general; both the work and oneself as general reader were si mul ta neously transformed. It turned out that reading Dostoevsky had al- ready proved transformative for Frank as well: to the surprise and disappointment of some, Frank put aside his role as major theoretician and literary critic to write a literary biography of Dostoevsky—a biography whose creation spanned the next de- cades of his life, u ntil 2002. He spent much of his final de cade working on the single- volume condensation of the biography and writing essays that appeared in publications such as the New York Review of Books. He published three impor tant collec- tions of his essays, Through the Rus sian Prism: Essays on Lit er a­ ture and Culture (1989), Between Religion and Rationality: Essays in Rus sian Lit er a ture and Culture (2010), and Responses to Moder­ nity: Essays in the Politics of Culture (2012). Frank’s work exhibits a thoughtful integrity, a willingness to follow the evidence wherever it led, even if that meant revising